Jack nodded. “And you’re proposing I do what?”
“Well, for starters, I’m sure you don’t want grifters running your hotel. I think for your own good you should let her go.”
“I see,” Jack said. He poured himself more coffee. Across the room, the waitstaff began setting up the breakfast buffet. “The thing is, Emma might not have known Henry very well, but I know Emma. I’ve known Emma Mapson since she was this high. Her father was an employee of mine. A good man.”
“I don’t see what that has to do with any of this.”
“Let’s put it this way, Bea—if you’re implying that Emma Mapson is some sort of scam artist or thief, it’s best if you find yourself another place to stay.”
Emma waited impatiently in the small corridor outside Dr. Wang’s office, yawning and trying not to worry about getting to work. She sipped her takeout coffee and mentally kicked herself for staying out so late.
What had she been thinking last night? The drinks at Murf’s, the boat ride out to Henry Wyatt’s house. She’d stood in the dining room staring out at the shimmering pool, going over and over in her mind everything that had happened since the minute that lawyer showed up on her doorstep.
Henry Wyatt didn’t have any living family. He’d never married, so there wasn’t even an ex-wife to worry about. Okay, so this Bea Winstead had known the guy for fifty years, but Henry Wyatt had chosen not to leave his house and his art to her. And going by the internet search Emma had done, it wasn’t like the old bird was hurting for cash. A New York Times article featured photos of her palatial Park Avenue apartment. So what did she care about the Sag Harbor house? That was the thing about the wealthy—they never had enough. She saw it all the time with the summer people, their unbelievable sense of entitlement.
When she finally got home, she was so adrenalized she couldn’t sleep. She tossed and turned thinking about the house, wondering if Bea was going to get Jack to fire her over it.
Dr. Wang poked her head out of the office. “Emma, let’s speak for a minute,” she said, stepping out and closing the door behind her.
“Everything okay?”
“I’m afraid Penny is backsliding a bit. I want to bring up, again, the option of putting her on an SSRI. They can be very effective in getting baseline OCD and anxiety under control, and that would give her the breathing room to employ the cognitive techniques we’re practicing here.”
Emma had been afraid she’d say that. “I’d rather give this more time. Unless Penny really feels she can’t get better without medication.”
“I’ll discuss it with her. I just wanted to make sure you’re open to the idea.”
Emma’s experience with her mother’s prescription-pill addiction made her especially wary of drug treatment. It was irrational, she knew; the type of medication Dr. Wang was proposing was nothing like the kind that had led to her mother’s downward spiral. Still, she couldn’t bring herself to agree to it. At least, not yet. “Penny has suffered a loss and I think that set her back. But I don’t want that to change our whole game plan.”
“Sometimes these things are beyond our control.”
It seemed that went for just about everything lately.
Chapter Fifteen
Main Street hummed with activity. Shop owners opened their doors, café workers set out chalkboards announcing the day’s lunch specials, mothers pushed strollers, and couples strolled hand in hand, sipping takeout coffee. It was all so picturesque, so lovely, Bea could almost forget the most recent indignity leveled on her by this town: If you’re implying that Emma Mapson is some sort of scam artist or thief, it’s best if you find yourself another place to stay.
Was that any way to talk to a customer? Eighty miles from New York City, and all common decency was lost. Obviously, she couldn’t spend another night under Jack Blake’s roof. She packed up her things but Kyle was nowhere to be found. She was already rolling her smallest suitcase to the car when he returned her call.
“Where in heaven’s name are you?” she said, her voice shrill.
“I’m just down the street. On the wharf.”
“I need you! Come back to the hotel immediately.”
He muttered something and then the connection was lost. She waited and waited in front of the flower boxes framing the hotel porch and still no Kyle. She called, but again, he didn’t answer his phone. Furious, she dragged her bag to the wharf.
She found him talking to someone on the dock, a fair-haired young man with an unfortunate scruffy beard.
“Kyle!” she yelled, walking to him as quickly as she could manage while maneuvering her bag on the uneven surface of the dock. Bump, bump, bump. She was certain the bottom was being destroyed. Her irritation gained strength, like a gathering storm. “What are you doing out here?”
“Bea, this is Sean Pine. He runs the water taxi out here.”
Bea nodded at the man, then turned to glare at Kyle. Did she look like she was in the mood to play meet-the-locals?
“He’s been doing this for nine years,” Kyle said. “Before that, he was in the Coast Guard.”
“Fascinating. Can I speak to you alone for a moment? Preferably in the shade?”
The only shelter was under the roof of the dockmaster’s office a few dozen feet behind her. Kyle took her bag.
“Why are you carrying this?” he asked.
“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. I’ve checked out of that horrid hotel. You’ll have to go back for the rest of the luggage.”
“I thought you said it was the only civilized place in town.”
“Don’t be smart with me, Kyle.”
“So where are you going to stay?”
“We are going to stay at Windsong.”
“I don’t think that’s a good idea right now.”
“And why is that?”
“That guy back there, Sean? He gave Emma Mapson a ride to the house last night.”
“He told you this?”
Kyle started to say something, then stopped. “Not exactly.”
“Let’s go. We’ll take the boat there ourselves.”
“That’s kind of aggressive, Bea. I just told you that Emma might be there.”
“She’s probably on her way to work. Besides, isn’t that a fundamental principle of war? To meet aggression with aggression? Really, Kyle. I know you’ve given notice, but during the two weeks you have remaining, please try to get with the program.”
She walked briskly to the edge of the dock. “Young man,” she called out.
Kyle ran up behind her. “Bea, let me handle this.”
He asked the water-taxi captain to take Bea to the same place that Emma Mapson had gone last night.
“Aren’t you coming?” Bea said.
He hesitated, then said, “You know what? I will. Just in case Emma is there and I need to act as a referee for you two.”
“So now it’s Emma? You’re on a first-name basis suddenly?”
Kyle’s face turned red.
Men! They were all the same.
He placed her bag on the boat and helped her step aboard. There was a padded bench in front of the controls and he kept hold of her arm until she was situated.
Bea held the metal rail and looked out at the open water. The launch went only about five miles an hour, but with the rumble of the engine and the wind in her face, she felt like they were really moving. She felt a sudden lightness, almost a happiness, despite the aggravating morning.
Kyle chatted to Sean the entire ride, telling him about his childhood at the Jersey Shore and about how his father had had a boat and about how he hadn’t realized how much he missed the water. Kyle had been in Bea’s employ for five years, but she was only now learning all this. Perhaps it was more than she needed to know, considering he was leaving her.
“I hear that a lot from people visiting out here,” Sean said. “They spend a day on the water and it’s like they never left it.”
A small dog jumped up onto the bench beside
her.
“Is this your animal?” she called out to Sean. Kyle shot her a look that said, Don’t complain. The dog rested its head in her lap.
The house came into view and took her breath away. The vantage point you got from the water was much more dramatic than what you saw when you approached it from the street. She was sure Henry had planned it that way, and she felt a pang. How she missed him. How adrift she felt. Why had he muddled this situation with his estate?
When they reached the dock, she counted out some bills from her wallet, handed them to Sean, and told him to keep the change.
“Well, that was refreshing,” she said as Kyle helped her off the boat.
“Glad you liked it,” he said. He followed her to the sliding glass doors at the back of the house.
Inside, it was steaming hot. None of the shades over the large windows had been drawn, and the sunlight poured through the skylights. If Emma Mapson had been there last night, she certainly hadn’t stayed very long.
“Put my bag in the master suite,” Bea said.
“Not the guest room?”
“No. Because I am not a guest. I am moving in.”
Penny shifted in her chair, sitting on her hands so Dr. Wang wouldn’t see them. The backs of her hands were cracked and bleeding from overwashing, and they were also glistening with the Aquaphor Penny had slathered on before her appointment in an attempt to hide the fact that they were a mess.
“Penny, it doesn’t look like you’re sticking to the thirty-second rule,” Dr. Wang said. Eagle eye!
“I’m trying to,” Penny said. Actually, she wasn’t trying one bit. Lathering up the soap was one of the few ways to release the pressure she felt. It wasn’t pressure as in the pressure to perform or do anything. It was more like a psychic weight that rested on her. Drawing used to give her some relief, but now she couldn’t even enjoy that. She kept trying to sketch, but the second a stroke of her pencil strayed from her intention, when the lines didn’t cooperate, she couldn’t erase them and keep going. She had to throw the whole thing away no matter how far along she was. She knew it was wrong, she knew it was a compulsion, but she couldn’t help herself.
She told this to Dr. Wang, who then leaned back in her chair, wrote something on her notepad, and looked at Penny with a warm smile.
“It sounds like you’re having a tough time. A little bit of a setback.”
Penny nodded, her eyes tearing up.
“I spoke to Mom about the option of adding medication to our program,” Dr. Wang said. She always referred to Emma as “Mom.” It was kind of weird.
Penny knew her mother was against medication. Penny could only imagine how her mom would feel if she found out about the little white pills from Mindy. She had to stop with that.
“Would that mean I don’t have to come to therapy anymore?”
“No,” Dr. Wang said quickly. “Medication and therapy work together. Penny, why are you so averse to therapy?”
She shrugged. “I guess I just want to be normal. Coming here makes me feel like I’m not.”
“What’s normal? You’re an artist. Some would say that’s not normal. But you wouldn’t change that, would you?”
Of course she wouldn’t. But sometimes she wondered what good it did her.
Chapter Sixteen
Emma, two things,” Jack Blake said, appearing in front of the desk. “I need a bar table, party of four, for dinner in an hour. We’ll need a bottle of the 2010 Lucien le Moine Chevalier-Montrachet from downstairs.”
“Got it,” she said, jotting down the name of the wine.
“Also, Emma, I had a conversation with Bea Winstead this morning. Seems she’s less than happy about this turn of events with the Wyatt house.”
So Bea had spoken to him after all. Her heart beat faster. “Yes, I know. I’m sorry. I’m not sure what to do about that.”
“Just keep the drama out of the hotel, okay?”
“Of course. No drama—I promise.”
That should be easier now that Bea Winstead had checked out. Thank goodness! Hopefully, she was on her way back to New York City at that very moment. Or, at the very least, checking into another hotel.
Jack smiled, tapped the desktop, and said, “Make that two bottles of the Montrachet.”
Emma blocked off his table in the reservation book, shaking her head. That woman had some nerve, making trouble for her at work. But what was Emma supposed to do about it? She could only hope Bea would get tired of arguing over a house that she had absolutely no legal claim to.
“Emma, hello!” said Mrs. Fleishman, a regular who always booked room number 8 for a week in June with her husband.
“Hi, Mrs. Fleishman. Wonderful to see you again. Let me just check to see if your table is ready.”
“We’re in no rush, dear. We’re going to have a drink first. But I had to ask—is this you?”
Mrs. Fleishman slid a copy of the New York Post across the desk. Emma followed the woman’s finger as she pointed to the words daughter of the desk manager of The American Hotel in Sag Harbor.
Her name. In the New York Post.
Her eyes scanned upward for the headline: “Battle Lines Drawn over the Estate of Artist Henry Wyatt.”
Society maven and art patron Bea Winstead is using her considerable clout to mount a legal challenge to the will of the late artist Henry Wyatt in a bid to preserve his art for the public.
Winstead has hired the firm Smythe, Bonivent, Worth to look into the will filed by the legendary painter and sculptor, which leaves his Hamptons home and the bulk of his estate to the daughter of the desk manager of The American Hotel in Sag Harbor.
The article went on to chronicle the significance of Henry’s body of work and suggested that Emma would somehow damage the legacy by selling it off piecemeal and not making the works available to museums. It said that the house, “designed by Wyatt, a piece of museum-quality art in itself,” should be a public space.
It concluded with a quote from an anonymous source: “We are investigating all avenues, including the possibility this will is a forgery.”
A forgery! This was absurd. Who would have forged it? Her?
She looked up to find Mrs. Fleishman beaming at her, as if Emma had just been profiled in Time magazine as its Person of the Year.
“Yep,” she said, handing the newspaper back to her. “That’s me.”
Bea tossed and turned in the darkness of her old friend’s bedroom.
The silence of the house on that remote, waterfront road was absolute. She would have liked to hear the stir of New York City outside her window, a distant car honking, the pipes of her upstairs neighbor. Anything to root her in the present, to assure her that she was tethered to the earth. Henry was gone, but she was still there.
Focus on the art. It had been the guiding principle of her entire adult life.
The thing that nagged at her most was the shift in style. Why the line drawings? The portraiture? She stared at the ceiling, growing increasingly certain that she was onto something, that if she could figure out the meaning of the last stage of Henry’s artistic career, she could decipher the mystery of his inexplicable will.
When it was finally light outside, she padded down the floating stairs. She desperately wanted someone to talk to about all of this. Sadly, Kyle was all she had.
She knocked on the closed guest-bedroom door. Kyle opened it, wrapped in the bed comforter. His thick head of golden-brown hair was mussed and he looked startlingly young. She thought how very ancient she must seem to him. Sometimes, she saw this on his face. And then she wanted to shake him, to say, Just you wait—it happens in an instant!
“Bea, it’s the middle of the night,” he said, scratching his head.
“No, it’s first thing in the morning. Meet me in the kitchen. I’ll put the coffee on.”
Some rooms of the house reminded her of Henry more than others. The kitchen was a sharp reflection of his personal taste, with its concrete countertops in dove gray, industri
al-like metal islands, black-granite sink, and ultramodern acrylic bar stools. There were odd eclectic touches, like the scuffed brown Hamilton coffeemaker that had to be thirty years old. Kyle had taken one look at it, declared it unusable, and gone out to buy a sleek new Cuisinart programmable brewer (she’d warned him not to come back with one of those god-awful pod devices). In the kitchen cabinet she discovered Henry’s collection of vintage ceramic Russel Wright plates.
She scooped the coffee into the stainless-steel brewer, poured the water, and got it started, ignoring most of the many buttons. She looked wistfully at its old neighbor sitting neglected a few inches away on the counter. She reached out and touched the beige handle of the glass pot, wondering if Henry had used it his last morning in the house.
“Okay, what’s so important?” Kyle said, now dressed in cargo shorts and a hoodie. He pulled two mugs out of the cabinet.
The coffee bubbled and hissed its way into the glass carafe. Bea leaned against the counter, too excited to sit at the table. “I think the drawings in town are clues. They mean something.”
Kyle nodded, eyeing the machine. When it was finished he filled the two mugs, handed one to Bea, and took a long sip of his own. “Bea, I hope you take this in the right way, because I’m trying to help you here: I think that’s wishful thinking.”
“Kyle, you can take this however you want: You don’t know what you’re talking about! Why would he spend his final year or so drawing pieces and giving them away? Essentially scattering them around town?”
“How do you know they are that recent?”
“They’re dated.”
Kyle seemed to consider this. He walked from the kitchen to the dining room and stared at the dining table that was perfectly aligned with the infinity pool on the other side of the glass wall, the two symmetrical and perfect in a stunning example of grand design. “So what do you want to do, Bea?”
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